Samsung Confirms Android 4.0 ICS for GALAXY S II for March 10

Rumors on the long-awaited Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update for Samsung Galaxy S II have come and gone, but the Korean handset maker did not confirm any release dates. It was originally believed that Samsung will deploy an Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Galaxy Note on March 1, followed by an update for the Galaxy S II within the next few days. It appears that the information wasn't that accurate, as Galaxy Note is still stuck on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. However, Samsung Galaxy S II has just been confirmed for an ICS update on March 10. According to Samsung Philippines, Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 upgrade for Galaxy S II will be available on March 10.  The update can be downloaded via Kies 2.0, but users are recommended to download...

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CeBIT 2012: Caterpillar Showcases CAT B10 Indestructible Android Phone

Caterpillar, yes you got that right, has just announced the upcoming availability of its rugged Android phone called CAT B10. The smartphone will be released on the market at the end of May. Potential customers who want to purchase the device would have to shell out no less than 380 EUR (about 500 USD). The folks at The Verge had the chance to play with the phone at the CEBIT 2012 exhibition, in Hannover, Germany. According to them, CAT B10 runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread operating system and sports a 3.2 capacitive touchscreen display that features Asahi coating, which protects it against scratches and scrapes. It has all sorts of rugged certifications and is powered by an 800 Mhz single core processor. It also sports a 5-megapixel rear...

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Toshiba’s Tegra 3 Powered 13.3-Inch Tablet Pictured

With the AT200 now successfully launched, Toshiba is looking to expand its tablet range with several new devices this year, including a 13.3-inch slate that will be powered by Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 chipset. The 13.3-inch monster was showcased by the company during a press conference held recently in the UK. Despite its impressive screen size, Pocket Lint reports that the tablet seemed extremely light when held in hand without being as cumbersome as one might expect. Along the sides of the tablet, Toshiba placed the usual USB and HDMI ports, as well as an SD card slot. Rear and front cameras were also present. The 13.3-inch Toshiba tablet presented during the event was just an early concept, but a company spokesperson told Pocket Lint...

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CeBIT 2012: Budget Friendly ECS Z77H2-A3 Ivy Bridge Motherboard Detailed

Together with the company’s Black Series of high-end Intel Z77 motherboards we detailed previously, ECS will also introduce a more budget friendly LGA 1155 solution based on the same chipset, dubbed the Z77H2-A3. Compared to its more powerful siblings, the Z77H2-A3 is designed for single-GPU systems, which means that it comes featuring a single PCI Express x16 add-on slot. This is however PCI Express Gen 3.0 compliant, so when the ECS motherboard is paired with an Intel Ivy Bridge processor, it will provide a full 16GB/s of bandwidth to the graphics card installed. Other add-on cards can be installed in the four PCI Express x1 slots available in the Z77H2-A3 or in the two 32-bit legacy PCI slots provided. As far as storage is concerned,...

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CeBIT 2012: AMD Socket FM2 Motherboards with A85 FCH to Arrive in June

Together with the launch of its next-gen Trinity APUs, AMD also plans to release a new chipset for these processors called the A85 FCH (Fusion Controller Hub), which support the company’s new FM2 socket. The first motherboards based on this chipset will arrive in June 2012, according to the ComputerBase website, which has received this information from industry sources present at the CeBIT fair. Little is known about the A85 FCH as far as its specifications are concerned, but USB-IF revealed late last year that native USB 3.0 support was to be expected. Starting with the summer of 2012, consumers will be able to pair motherboards powered by the AMD A85 Fusion Controller Hub with A10- or A8-Series desktop APUs. The most advanced of these...

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Nokia Lumia 610 Spotted at FCC, Possibly Headed to AT&T

The cheapest Lumia series smartphone is about to make its debut in the United States. Nokia Lumia 610 has yet to be confirmed in North America by the Finnish company. However, it looks like the Windows Phone device has just been spotted at the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) by the folks over at Engadget.  There’s no telling if the phone will be available in the United States through official channels, but the FCC documents indicate that the smartphone received approval for GSM 850 / 1900 radios, which makes it compatible with AT&T’s network. Even if the Lumia 610 won’t be launched through any US-based carriers, there’s a chance that owners will be able to use it with AT&T. Nokia officially confirmed that Lumia 610 would...

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Add Start Button to Windows 8

As Windows 8 no longer features the iconic “Start” button it fell into the hands of third-party developers to come up with a substitute. Stardock seems to be the first company to tackle the problem as they released Start8, an application specially designed to bring back the Start orb from Windows Vista and 7. However, its functionality is not the same, as it does not provide the menu you’re accustomed to in previous versions of Windows. That is not to deny its benefits altogether because Start8 enables quick access to installed programs and search function. Additionally, it can help you turn off the computer in fewer clicks by making the Shutdown option available in the context menu of the button. The program is free of charge and it is...

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Official: HTC Sensation XE Receiving Android 4.0 Update Now

HTC has just started to deploy the Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Sensation XE devices. So far, it appears that the update is only pushed OTA (over the air) in Nordic countries, and probably in Germany as well. Those who live in one of the Nordic countries or Germany will receive an update notification soon, but they can also check for it manually. The update is close to 300MB in size and requires a stable Wi-Fi connection. Keep in mind that this Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich update will also upgrade the smartphone’s HTC Sense UI to version 3.6. The folks over at XDA Developers have also uploaded the file, so those who have yet to receive the file OTA can download and install it manually. For more details on where to download Android...

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The New iPad Will Not Support European LTE Networks

The new iPad recently announced by Apple seems to be mostly targeting the North American market. Although the slate is advertised as a 4G LTE device, the feature is only available in some regions. Obviously, this is not entirely Apple’s fault, as both international and AT&T variants have been confirmed to support 700MHz and 2100MHz LTE bands, which are fully compatible with the US-based carrier’s network. According to Slashgear, even though LTE network is almost inexistent in Europe, as soon as the new technology is deployed, it will only support devices that work on 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2600MHz bands. This basically makes the new iPad useless in Europe when it comes to 4G LTE data speeds. European customers who decide to purchase this...

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CeBIT 2012: ASRock Intros the First AMD Board Supporting Lucid Virtu MVP Technology

ASRock gives us a break from all the Intel Z77 powered motherboard present at this year’s CeBIT 2012 fair with the introduction of the A75 Pro4/MVP, the first AMD Llano board out there to support the Lucid Virtu Universal MVP technology. The LucidLogix technology embedded in ASRock’s motherboard was specially designed to allow for on-die GPUs to be used together with discrete graphics cards. Unlike AMD’s Hybrid graphics implementation found in the A-Series chipsets, the Lucid Virtu Universal MVP technology has the benefit of being vendor agnostic.  This means that it allows users to install discrete graphics cards built by either Nvidia or AMD and use them together with their on-board Radeon GPU in order to improve the overall performance...

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CeBIT 2012: Gigabyte Displays Its First LGA 2011 Workstation Board

Better known in the industry for its consumer products than professional motherboards, at this year’s CeBIT fair Gigabyte has presented the company’s first LGA 2011 solution designed specifically for workstation use, the GA-X79S-UD5. Despite its model name, the motherboard isn’t actually built around Intel’s consumer X79 PCH, but is rather based on the chip maker’s C606 controller. While at the silicon level these chipsets are basically identical, the C606 does provide users with some extra features that weren’t enabled in the consumer version of the PCH. The most important of these is the SAS support, which provides Gigabyte’s motherboard with six SAS 6Gbps connectors to complement the usual two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports found...

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Apple Confirms Chip Rumors - A5X Powers the New iPad

A rumor that few granted as much credit as they should have, talk of the A5X chip was confirmed during Apple’s special event yesterday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, California. The silicon is not exactly the minor incremental bump we were led to believe. According to Phil Schiller, the chip has quad-core graphics, which allows it to output some amazing visuals on the 3.1 million pixels boasted by the new iPad’s display. The tech-specs page for the new iPad describes the chip as follows: “Dual-core Apple A5X custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip with quad-core graphics.” The news actually corroborates another rumor as well - that the iPhone 5 is expected to be the first device to pack the...

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Asus Dual-Socket Z9PE-D8-WS LGA 2011 Motherboard Now Official

Shortly after the introduction of Intel’s LGA 2011 Xeon E5 processor family, Asus has made the company’s Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard for dual-socket Sandy Bridge-EP high-end workstations official . As some of you may remember, the board was unveiled in January of this year, during the CES 2012 fair, and comes as a direct competitor for the EVGA Classified SR-X introduced just yesterday. Just like its EVGA-built counterpart, the Z9PE-D8-WS features dual LGA 2011 sockets which, in this case, are paired together with four DIMM slots each, in order to enable the motherboard to hold up to 256GB of RAM. Seven PCI Express x16 slots are also available, driven by the 80 PCIe lanes available in the Xeon E5-series processors. Of course, such a high-end...

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Intel Xeon E5 CPUs Get Five New LGA 2011 Motherboards from Tyan

Tyan, a company well known for its server platforms, has just unveiled five new LGA 2011 dual-socket motherboard models for the recently announced Xeon E5 processors based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge-EP architecture. The motherboards were designed to fulfill various roles in the enterprise, ranging from small business computing to mission-critical virtualization or datacenter applications. All of these boards feature dual LGA 2011 sockets, but the rest of their specifications vary depending on the type of application they are meant for. This means that motherboards built for virtualization or for being used in rack servers, such as the S7050, support an impressive 16 DDR3 memory slots (8 for each CPU). The S7055, which are optimized for datacenter...

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CeBIT 2012: Nvidia GTX 680 Kepler GPU Packs Dynamic Overclocking, Arrives This Month

By the end of this month, Nvidia plans to update its product portfolio with the company’s first 28nm graphics card based on the Kepler architecture, the GeForce GTX 680, which sources seem to imply will feature a new dynamic overclocking technology. German website Heise.de learned about this new feature from several Nvidia add-in board partners, who were present at this year’s CeBIT fair. The technology, which is called “Dynamic Clock Adjustment,” works in a similar manner with Intel’s Turbo Boost tech introduced by the chip makers with the Nehalem processor architecture. Just like Intel’s CPUs, Nvidia’s GK104 graphics core constantly monitors the power consumption of the card and compares it against its factory TDP limit. If this technology...

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Duqu Framework Coded in Unknown Programming Language

F Sharp, Iron Python, CPLEX LIB, High-Level Assembly, LISP, Erlang are just a few of the names of programming languages in which Duqu’s framework could be written. It’s uncertain yet which one it is, but one thing is clear, the malware’s framework looks different from anything else previously analyzed by Kaspersky experts. The researchers determined that Duqu’s Payload library (DLL) looks like a common Windows PE DLL compiled in Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008.  “The entry point code is absolutely standard, and there is one function exported by ordinal number 1 that also looks like MSVC++,” Kaspersky Lab Expert Igor Soumenkov said.  “This function is called from the PNF DLL and it is actually the 'main' function that implements...

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